Would like to avoid the obvious like investing in stocks, crypto, 401k, etc.
Would you invest in real estate (how so?), would you open a franchise (which one?), would you build an app (what's it do?), would you do something else?
Would you want to play risky where you do not mind loosing a chunk of the size? Invest in a few obscured cryptos after doing some due diligence where there is a chance of 10-100x return.
Want to play safe where moderate risk is tolerable? Invest in real-estate but it also depends on market and country. People think buying a franchise will make them an entrepreneur but remember franchise is nothing but a job disguised under thin veil of entrepreneurship. In Franchise business, someone else has a major control over your business and you have to play by their playbook rule. In addition, there is a very little room to scale.
However, if you are person with some developer or marketeer skill then this is the best route to go. If you have few ideas then you can test those by developing a prototype and putting in hand of customers and getting feedback. But be aware that for each prototype you should not spend more than 5-10k. If you have sufficient time in your hand then other non conventional investments can be buying farm lands and trying organic farming, providing micro-loans to entrepreneurs etc.
There's an untapped customer market of Solo RP. Basically people who take something like D&D and become the player and the GM, but most don't enjoy playing both roles. It's not necessarily D&D; there's hundreds of tabletop rules that people just want to experiment with but can't find interested friends. Video games don't really work because they're railroaded and don't give as much agency.
There's some basic tools like Mythic GM emulator, which is basically a set of rules to make things surprising. This is something that can be done 10x better with just an app, and done 100x better with an app + GPT-3.
From that, you can branch into a new genre of gaming based around AI.
Some will bring up AI Dungeon, but the downside there is that AI is terrible at maintaining state. The game is good at simulating a date between you and your possessed spear. But 15 mins later, it will forget about your demonic spear boyfriend. Humans are great at maintaining these states, and making the call whether this should be a big part of the game they're playing or not. AI Dungeon is poor at conflict resolution - you stab the dragon once with your magic spear and there's maybe a 50% chance of instantly killing it, because it's not tracking injury or difference in strength, or even plausibility. Humans and RP systems handle this much better.
Can something like this make over $200k? I'd bet on it. AI Dungeon certainly did.
Sometimes, people lose sight of the fact that money is meant to move. It can come back to you and enrich your life in other ways. Fund a local group doing a good job solving a community problem. Doesn't even have to be big. The business you facilitate doing that chains to other transactions, and odds are you'll start transforming some of that fiscal capital into social capital.
For a higher risk option that’s not been mentioned you could look at peer to peer (p2p) lending.
You don’t have to make a lot of money on it. Investment devaluation makes it tax neutral-ish.
(Also, a 401k is an investment vehicle, not an investment in and of itself)
Renting could be an option, but probably better to use it as vacation rentals rather than permanent due to all the uncertainty around rent payments during the pandemic (and potentially after).